For over two centuries, Asprey has been recognised as one of the world’s pre-eminent luxury goods brands and storied silversmiths. Here, Chairman John Rigas reveals the company’s ambitious plans to grow jadeite, a scarce and highly valuable mineral, as a new metier in its mission to push true luxury forward.

Please can you tell us about your entry into the luxury sector?

Initially, I was in the financial business and bought Asprey 17 years ago because there was an opportunity to buy a very old brand with a tremendous heritage. I was brought in by the then-CEO of the company who wanted someone to help him restructure the company and create a new strategy and path forward. I didn’t have any special expertise in luxury prior to that. My wife actually has much more of a connection with luxury because she comes from a family that owned watch businesses such as Longines and LeCoultre before it became Jaeger LeCoultre. If there’s anybody in our family who comes from a luxury background it’s her.

In order to be in luxury, you have to be educated and understand the history of royal houses and their patronage of different skills and artisans. Historically, luxury had been created for royal patrons, or very important patrons, who had the wherewithal to hire craftspeople with the ability to create luxury products, which cannot be necessities by definition. And it goes back as far as you want. I’m originally from Greece, so you can go back to Alexander the Great, and the jewellery that the Macedonian dynasty had at the time, or Byzantium and see the continuity of the jewellery that was primarily made for queens, princesses and kings. It’s the same with maharajas in India, where there is a huge tradition of jewellery. Then obviously moving to Western Europe, everybody knows about the Venetians and the Genoese, and everything that was created there. So it’s very interesting that the biggest luxury houses actually exist in countries that have royal houses and royalty.

Everybody now talks about ‘mass luxury’ and ‘little luxuries’ because the definition of the word luxury has broadened enormously. As far as we are concerned, we define it as innovation, quality and refinement. I didn’t invent that – Karl Lagerfeld did – but I strongly believe in it. These foundations are very important to our focus on creating the very best with an intrinsic value that cannot, by definition, be mass market. It’s a different approach from other firms that want to have a large market, but we continuously find new areas to implement this type of business strategy and approach to life.

One of our biggest initiatives this year has been the introduction of our imperial jadeite collection. We have been assembling it for several years because we wanted to have enough objets d’art, as well as jewellery, to launch a collection. Other brands have tried to do this, but they haven’t had enough mass. This is an example of the best of the best, and it’s rarefied. Part of what we’re doing is educating the Western world on what jadeite actually is because many people mistake it for nephrite, which is not valuable. That’s why I keep going back to the fact that luxury is about history and education. It’s about how the royal houses have evolved and how that cultural aspect is incorporated because a lot of luxury items have cultural or religious meanings. To know all that is to be able to participate in the true luxury market.

What drew you to Asprey and what has the brand come to mean for you since joining? Asprey is 242 years old and when I bought the company, it was in a transitional phase. The four cores of Asprey are jewellery, crystal and china, leather, and watches, but when I joined it had expanded to 14 categories, so suddenly Asprey was everywhere. We had socks, shoes, sweaters, and this and that. Although one could say that made sense – you can expand a brand slowly without losing its core – they expanded too fast, and it threw off the client base. So we removed all the irrelevant categories, like the socks, and focused on the core.

One of the characteristics of Asprey is that you will always go back to find something unique. That proposition changed over time, and certainly over the time that I have owned the company. In the past, every city in Europe would have a store where someone who is adventurous and well travelled brought back items from other places and sold them to the locals with good taste. The Aspreys played that role for a long time: they would travel around the world, bringing back exotic products that were unique and selling them to clients in London. With the advent of mass travel and the Internet, you can find and ship everything and anything. So I wanted to change that part of Asprey. I didn’t want to have any more random things that someone from the family found, so we agreed that everything has to be the Asprey look and feel in the four key categories. Aside from now, Asprey was at its most creative during the Art Deco years when it led British Deco, a very particular artistic movement, in London. British Deco was everywhere and extremely interesting and while it’s hard to prove, I believe that Asprey was the biggest brand in the world at that time. We have found catalogues in our archives from those years, which are magnificent, and we still sell some of the same products now. Every brand on the planet now has a Bugatti bag, and you’ll find them in our catalogue in five sizes. So the main character of the brand is British Deco and you can see it in our silver most clearly, as well as in other products.

Asprey has always been at the very top of the luxury pyramid, above everybody else. You have to focus on why you’re there and what you’re doing while you’re up there. If you want to be the best in what you do, and you have four categories, that’s not easy. It’s not just the product either, it’s also the behaviour of the people in the store and how the product is delivered. More recently, we had the opportunity to restructure our retail network, and we were able to create a store like I thought it should be. Our new store in Bruton Steet in London is a completely different concept to what we had before. You are immersed in the brand, there are no distractions, and you see the product in a new light in a new setting. We had the phenomenon of clients saying, “Oh, you have this new thing here – it’s wonderful.” And I would say, “no, we’ve had it for five years, you just didn’t notice it before.” I think the transformation in that respect is now complete, and we are rolling that out throughout the retail network. New York is going to be next.

Asprey is renowned for its craftsmanship. Can you tell us about the craftspeople Asprey works with?

We have an ecosystem of artists and artisans around the world that we work with to obtain the best of the best. We work with an artist in the UK called Jonathan Harris, who is famous for his technique of carving glass from the inside. He works for us exclusively and makes our vases. We have a collaboration with Silvia Furmanovich, an atelier in the Amazon who has educated the locals in German marquetry, a skill they use on local wood, which can give you every colour in the spectrum without using dye. We put their marquetry in boxes and position them in frames as well as other products. We work with a workshop in Afghanistan, which is very well known for lapis lazuli because that’s where it originated. They have the stone and we worked with the workshop to help deliver the product to a level that could be sold at an Asprey store – and it was a bestseller.

And everyone wants to work with us. For all my life I’ve been doing martial arts and when my karate instructor was in Tokyo, he saw a documentary about how they make the obi, which is the belt that goes on the kimono. The craftspeople take these minerals – lapis lazuli, gold and silver – crush them to be super thin and glue them onto this ultra-thin paper so it becomes like a fabric. It’s incredibly beautiful and goes in the wide belts that the geishas wear. We approached the grand master who creates the obi, and he said to us, “everybody has come through here, from every brand that you know, and I said no to all of them, but I’m going to say yes to you because of who you are and what you do.”

Japan is also very ahead of the curve with innovation in fabrics and materials. We found this factory which has made samurai armour for four centuries. In order to have flexibility, the thick armour has three layers with leather and lacquered deerskin. An arrow cannot pierce the armour because of the shock absorption of the three layers – it expends its kinetic power before piercing. So we used that lacquering technique to make bags, which were a sell-out because the leather is indestructible – it doesn’t even scratch because it’s so beautifully lacquered. That is luxury because it is the pursuit of quality and innovation, to take something from one world and bring it to a different one. People making samurai armour would not think they would be making handbags for young women to go to the club!

What inspired Asprey to grow imperial jadeite as a new metier?

How does this new exclusive collection align with Asprey’s brand values? As a brand that is supposed to be innovative and provide something unique and collectable, we want to do something different when we bring important products to the very competitive jewellery market. You have to have a very strong underpinning of limitation in supply so that as demand grows, values go up. Imperial jadeite is appreciating in value every year because there is a limited supply, so it fits perfectly in terms of meeting the criteria that we have set for ourselves.

One of the problems in the jadeite business is that the certification and standardisation of jadeite are non-existent. If you’re a buyer, you want to be assured that you’re paying a high price for a high-priced item, which is not always the case with jadeite because practices are not always above board. We went to Oxford University and set the Department of Earth Sciences up with equipment from Japan so that if you buy jadeite from us you get a certificate from Oxford University with a full gemological signature of attributes of the item. Further to that, we are working on etching the item with a serial number in a way that it cannot be brushed off so that the item corresponds with the certificate that was issued. We’ll then post that on the blockchain, so it will be forever. People who buy will have the certainty that it is the real thing, along with full certification and authentication that cannot be altered so it’s fully collectable. That’s a big part of what we want to do at the super high end because when you’re asking people to pay a high price, the value proposition has to be strong.

Design is subjective – something that’s popular today may not be popular next year or in the next century – but I promise you that an imperial jadeite bangle is going to be popular today, next year and in 100 years, as proven by the history of Chinese consumers collecting jade and jadeite. Jade has a huge history and cultural significance, and not just in China – it is the national stone of Japan, and has been for centuries. It’s also very popular in Mexico and Guatemala because they have jadeite at the highest level but not in the quantities that you get from Myanmar. And it’s also extremely popular in the Middle East because green is the colour of Muhammad.

What was the process in sourcing and collecting the vintage pieces and how did you approach the design of new items in the imperial jadeite collection?

Imperial jadeite is very difficult to source in large quantities. The first time that I started looking was in Myanmar 12 years ago. Nothing happened because although it’s mined there, none of it is available – it’s either available in Thailand or Hong Kong or other places in China. Eventually, we were able to find some dealers we were comfortable with, and who had the high-quality jadeite we needed, and we started working with three different sources – some with more rough jadeite and some with more finished goods.

In terms of what is informing our own designs, and what we carve now, we’re being very conservative. We don’t want to change or reinvent traditions that go back 300 years in one collection. In jadeite, there are certain designs that are very specific. For example, there is the saddle ring, which is a historical Chinese design that you do not change. Then there is the bangle, which can be rounded or with perpendicular sides, and depending on what it is, has different meanings and associations in the mind of whoever owns or wears it. When you cut the bangle, the inside becomes a disk that you pierce and becomes a pendant. That’s a classic. Then you have the cabochon cuts for rings and perpendicular, flowing, long earrings which are called water earrings. Water is another way of characterising super high quality jade because if you have colour translucency, it is like seeing through the water. For high-quality jadeite, water is a very big compliment. So in the beginning we have stuck with the classical designs with some embellishments. For example, because the bangle is difficult to put on, we have added connectors so it can open and close. It’s like Picasso said, first you have to learn how to paint traditionally and then you do the abstraction. We have to do the basics first, then you can experiment and push the edge of the envelope.

How do you define luxury in the future?

The definition – quality, innovation and refinement – is not going to change but our mission and values are super flexible. For example, using the best technology. Two hundred years ago, the highest luxury in the UK was silk, so the best technology created beautiful silk. Now, technology is everywhere. With jadeite, it’s the Japanese machines that use technology to provide you with an accurate, dependable gemological analysis of your luxury item, which will last forever. Or it’s Asprey Digital Studio where we use Web 3.0 to create digital products such as our Asprey Bugatti La Voiture Noire Collection. Not only did you get a collectable handmade 21cm version of the car, which goes on a plaque, but all the plaques have different colours – either Bugatti or Asprey brand colours. It was random, so when you were buying your NFT, you didn’t know which one you were going to get. This was done using a Discord channel and we had 100,000 people apply for 261 NFTs. That’s future luxury because those people are either younger or digitally savvy, technology entrepreneurs or art collectors who are interested in digital art. We have partnered with Adobe, so anything new that they want to do, they try it with us first. That would be an example of where the words are the same – ‘use the best technology available’ – but what they mean changes from decade to decade and century to century. Essentially it’s the same focus on the target: to do the best possible using the means that you have. For us, that will not change. The mission and values last forever.

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